It is well known in the art that surfaces, such as walkways, driveways, patios, floors, work surfaces, walls and other interior or exterior surfaces can be covered for durability and aesthetics with flagstones, stones, bricks, pavers, tiles and other architectural surface covering elements. Natural stone surface coverings are constructed by fitting together irregularly sized and shaped flat stones, such as flagstone, stone and slate. This work requires a skilled stonemason to select, cut and fit the stones. It is labor intensive, and accordingly expensive. To minimize installation time, the stonemason uses a combination of large stones or slabs, for achieving as much surface coverage in as short a time as possible, and a collection of small stones, so called filler stones, for filling in any gaps between the irregularly shaped large stones.
Various efforts have been made to develop artificial building elements, such as bricks, stones, flagstones, pavers, or the like with the appearance of natural stone. Such artificial building elements are usually relatively inexpensively mass produced by molding them from concrete, usually in a dry casting operation. They are typically provided in geometric shapes, such as triangles, squares, rectangles and hexagons, or in irregular shapes, or combinations thereof The goal is to provide units of preset shape, which can be placed side by side in mating arrangement to produce a continuous surface covering. However, even if irregularly shaped stones are used, the repetitive nature of the installation usually results in a repeating, sometimes even geometric pattern, or at least a ‘linear line effect’. This counteracts any ‘natural’ appearance of the overall surface covering, despite the almost ‘natural’ appearance of the individual elements. Furthermore, even irregularly shaped stones with randomly placed simulated joints embossed into their facing surface, when laid out in mating arrangement still produce a repeating pattern, since the overall shape of the stones becomes apparent from the pattern of the perimeter joints around the stones, once multiple stones are laid out in a repeating pattern. Thus, these stones still fail to provide an aesthetically pleasing appearance with a degree of natural irregularity close to that of custom installations of natural stone.
Thus, there still exists a need for an artificial stone, flagstone, paving stone or the like which upon installation in a mating array with like artificial stones provides the appearance of a natural stone installation with large slabs and intermediate small filler stones.